Meshuggah revealed founding guitarist Fredrik Thordendal is going on a hiatus due to “a mission to explore some interesting stuff.” The band informed, he was asked to take on an assignment (unknown which one) and, “it’s time to realize his aspirations.” We don’t know what this means for the future of Meshuggah aside from the fact that their tour with Megadeth, Tesseract, and Lillake will continue without him. The band announced Thordendal’s replacement will be Scar Symmetry guitarist Per Nilsson, “for the duration of ‘The Thords’ hiatus.”

The group shared the following on their Facebook:

“So…we had to send our interdimensional Kazoospecialist Dr Thordendal on a mission to explore some interesting stuff. He’s been asking for this assignment for quite a while and it seems now is the time to realize his aspirations. This would however leave the rest of us unable to deliver our usual tonal obscenities for quite some time… and obviously we can’t have that!

So we put our five blocks of wood together and came up with a brilliant plan that we thought would be productive, intelligent and artistically mature.

We took some rolls of duct tape, a black hood, a sock with a cue ball and some rope and drove north from Stockholm in a sketchy van to fetch ourselves the prey we wanted, to fill the Kazoospot for a while. We won’t get into the messy details but we can now proudly present our interim Lead Kazooist for the duration of “The Thords” hiatus: PER NILSSON!!

MAN he knows how to Kazoo!! You will meet him first time on our summer run in North America with Megadeth and be all the better for it!! Honestly, we could just send Per by himself but we decided the rest of us will tag along for moral support

*End of transmission*”